Comscore has released some interesting statistics about the US traffic to the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn. According to Comscore, LinkedIn had 8 million US visitors in July this year, an increase of 66% compared to a year ago.

But the really interesting part was some data extraction about the kind of visitors that LinkedIn is getting. By cross-referencing visits to job-seeking sites with visits to LinkedIn, Comscore was able to estimate of how many of LinkedIn’s visitors are job seekers (and even to what degree those visitors are looking for a job).

According to that data, the average LinkedIn user is 2.4 times as likely as the average Internet user to be looking for a job. A full 28.5% of LinkedIn’s users are looking for a job.

Source: Comscore.

Using Comscore’s data from the graph above, we get that compared to the average Internet user, LinkedIn users are:

• 3.42 times as likely to be heavy job seekers.
• 2.20 times as likely to be medium job seekers.
• 2.14 times as likely to be light job seekers.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that people who visit LinkedIn are more inclined to be looking for a job than the average Internet user, especially at this time of economic recession.

It would have been very interesting to see what this metric looked like a year ago and how it has changed over time. LinkedIn has probably always had a much higher ratio of job seekers as visitors than the average site. But as a piece of the puzzle, it’s still relevant and shows that many are turning to social networking when looking for a job (which is just an extension of how we act in the real world, isn’t it?)